[A16] General Balance Mod (raid threat points, impressiveness, shooting, etc)

[Greep]

NOTE: No longer requires Hugslib.  If you don't want turret/trap rebalance, delete Defs/Buildings_Security.xml  Further updates will be only mentioned in replies rather than the OP for my sanity's sake xD  Until I make an official release anyways.

Basically making a mod for people who don't really use mods (mod is attached below)   This is going to be a very lightweight mod that tweaks things that obviously need to be changed. Heavy changes will come later, though, possibly as a separate release.

Changes:

-Tweaked postprocessing of shooting accuracy at high and low ends so non-cyborgs/non-careful shooters can be effective snipers at highish (12+) shooting and people with a bruise to the head can hit the broad side of a barn

-Nerfed careful shooter from +25/+50 to +20/+10, effectively forcing them to at least get basic training before being sniping gods. +10 accuracy is more effective than it looks.

-Considerably nerfed energy shield recharge rate.  Shields get you to the enemy but you're on your own at that point, and they are much less useful for decoys.

-TEMP: Pyros 5 times less likely to go crazy

-TEMP: x3 penoxcycline market cost/material cost, making it not useful on a colony-wide permanent basis until end-game.  However, immunity gain rate on malaria is slightly improved so it will basically never kill off young colonists when treated with terrible doctors, if treated.

-Removal of cryptosleep consciousness penalty so it doesn't affect stats on initial page.  You will still puke your guts out, though.

-Decrease shared bedroom from -5 mood to -1.  Disturbed sleep made barracks too worthless when combined with shared bedroom, now it's a semi-viable.


-Considerably increase orbit ship frequency, variety and quantity of goods.  Want a colony of joywired colonists in synthread?  Now you can after a few years (if you can afford it).  However, difficulty settings increase the buy/sell penalities by a somewhat larger factor.  This is so buy/selling the new high priced goods isn't abused with high level crafters, and the somewhat lower difficulty of gameplay is offset with higher prices.

-TEMP:  Increased turret component cost from 3->10 and all traps +1 component, including deadfall.  Significantly lowered low tier weapon/armor costs and work time (didn't bother with prices due to sell price multiplier).  Eventually will be further tweaked with raid scale changes/security changes with hopefully a complete nerf of turrets, and may add a "vest" clothing item so people can make leather vests.


Further short term changes will include:

-Security/raid rebalancing (smaller/smarter raids, more logical threat points, severe nerfing of security buildings)
-Infinite logarithmic room interest mood gains and other end game goals
-More rebalancing
-Skill gain rebalance for long-lived forts
-Stuff...?

Currently it's just stuff I could do with xml in a day, so it's in a very WIP state, however, it's somewhat useful as is.  Open to suggestions, but I've plenty of work I want to do.

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[Granitecosmos]

I like that list. You might want to check out my Quality Fix mod, especially the readme I mention there. Feel free to incorporate it into your pack. You'll find it here, along with my other stuff.

[Greep]

For quality fix, I'm going to change how raid size calculations work instead, if I get to the point where I'm making dlls.  If I don't, I'll incorporate yours, though.  Still barreling through easy xml changes, looks like I can get close enough to what I want with trade using just xml, so I'm doing that now.

I would say, for now, that I'd just recommend people download your mod in addition since I don't think they'd conflict

Edit: Updated mod, new decription points:

-Consiserably increase orbit ship frequency, variety and quantity of goods.  Want a colony of joywired colonists in synthread?  Now you can after a few years (if you can afford it).  However, difficulty settings increase the buy/sell penalities by a somewhat larger factor.  This is so buy/selling the new high priced goods isn't abused with high level crafters, and the somewhat lower difficulty of gameplay is offset with higher prices.

-TEMP:  Increased turret component cost from 3->10 and all traps +1 component, including deadfall.  Significantly lowered low tier weapon/armor costs and work time (didn't bother with prices due to sell price multiplier).  Eventually will be further tweaked with raid scale changes/security changes with hopefully a complete nerf of turrets, and may add a "vest" clothing item so people can make leather vests.

[Greep]

Updated about, added new stuff and dll.  Now requires hugslib and yells at you if you don't have it.  This requirement will be removed in the future as I move over to harmony, it's kind of a mix of both atm.

RAID CHANGES:

-Currently changed raid to be time based.  Very specifically, raid size is completely replaced with 2 hours = 1 threat point, 1 colonist = 20 threat points, modified by difficulty.

No cuts to 1000+,2000+
No basis on wealth.
No early game curation (if you get a raid on day 1 they will be shockingly inept)

Not extensively tested, I'm busy modding atm so I'm only testing to see if it functions right now.  So let me know how that works guinea pigs   Theoretically, now that it is no longer tied to wealth, this should mean hard biomes are harder and easy biomes are easier.

-Caravan incidents are simply 10 times smaller than colony raids.  This makes small caravans no longer suicide on long missions.  Will probably randomize this a bit.   And maybe add a touch of wealth influence here since it makes a lot of sense.

ROOM CHANGES:

-Bedroom impressiveness is now scored separately from other room types.  Right now, this means they have a much higher leeway with size restrictions.  a 4x4 is no longer softcapped at "slightly impressive" but instead "very impressive", and a 6x6 essentially has no hard cap.  It just didn't make sense to me that people needed a cafeteria sized room to be impressed at the bedroom.  However, impressiveness above 100 is halved for bedrooms to make up for this.

-The softcap by room size is now a much harder cap for all rooms when it is breached, however.  Instead of extra points being cut in 4, they are now cut in 10.  This is to make way for the upcoming infinite impressiveness.  Wouldn't want it to be abused with 1x2 rooms with a legendary golden statue giving 1000 impressiveness or whatever.

Edit: Fixed bug in impressivesness for non-bedrooms

[Greep]

More stuff:

INFINITE ROOM QUALITY:

Redid the upper tiers of room quality, adding two tiers above wondrous, and a third above those that is kind of silly.  I'm very surprised that this was entirely possible with xml.

Wondrous -> lowered to 220 impressiveness from 240.
Amazing ->  270 impressiveness.  colonists give highly impressed thoughts and more mood bonus
Shocking ->  320 impressiveness.  Even more mood bonus, thoughts tend to be silly and break the fourth wall.  Almost not achievable, but technically can be reached in an actual game. Would be very difficult to maintain it due to dirt on the floor since you'd need about 330 to maintain it.
Disturbing -> 400 impressiveness.  High mood debuff, colonists are freaked out into an existential crisis.  Due to logarithmic room stat gains and space maxing out at 350, it's not realistically achievable though.  Can be achieved in god mode or with silly mods.  Kind of hard even in god mode, though.

Additional minor change: Silver and gold tile floors now have a cleanliness rating of 0.5, up from 0, putting it only 0.1 away from sterile.  This means, if you're going solely for room stats, gold and silver are not a bad option now.

Really all I have left now before a v1 release is increasing early game raid size while smoothing out early game colonist gain rate.  Writing off skill gain rebalance as mysteriously unmoddable for bizarre reasons, until I get more experience anyways.

[SpaceDorf]

Sounds great so far, posting to follow

[Greep]

CODE COMPLETE

Mod will be expanded and tweaked, but this is good enough for v1.  Soon to be released after the, ahem, arduous task of repeated internal testing and mod description update which is now not even close to accurate.  Should be good to play now, and I welcome testing.  Might not be a great gameplay experience until I finish testing as the raid constant and some trader values is a complete guess, but I think it is especially necessary that raid size is time based.

Removed hugslib dependency, moved everything over to harmony.

CATASTROPHES:

Starting after 2 years have passed with very small chance and increasing likelihood, raids have a chance of turning to catastrophic proportions.  Basically, the raid size is raised to the 1.12 power.  This has a small effect on lower difficulties but bigger raids tend to double or triple.  Combined with randy's raid value variance, the effects can be a little silly.

Chance maxes out at 10% in year 10 and beyond.

Future updates, will, if I get around to it, instead cause an incident spiral.  Mass chaos is always better than number buffing.

EARLY GAME POP SMOOTHING:

PopMin and popMax storyteller values are now somewhat time sensitive. If you're getting seriously bad luck with recruits or you suffer an early game raid setback, your population increases will pick up.

Min and Max never exceed +2 of their original values, however, and critical is untouched.

GENERAL TWEAKS:

-Increased turret component cost more and nerfed deadfalls to oblivion.  The early game pop flexibility and lower early game raid size should offset the increased difficulty of setting up defenses.  Later I will give deadfalls a comeback as a temporary trap (auto destroy on trigger)

-Halved component material cost, work-time, and production building cost.  Doubled market price.  The result is you still can't make a profit off of producing components, but you can mass produce them in the mid game.  If you're going for a killbox, you can somewhat achieve it midgame if you seriously go all out in research and mining.  By endgame, you can fill your map with hydroponics and mass produce power armor.

-More buffs to high level flooring.  Silver 3->5 beauty.  Gold 4->20.  Holy crap these sucked.

-Inverted the "nerf" to high level bedrooms, actually increasing it after it passes 100.  Realistically, you just don't need as much stuff to be impressed at an individual bedroom, there was no need to offset the space limitation buff.


Edit: Raid size is way too high currently for lack of turrets, fighting against charged rifles with shotguns every raid is a bit exhausting due to the occasional death.  I think the course of action now is to further reduce raid size while just eliminating turrets altogether, as the cases where I fight easy raids, they're a bit more fun, and you actually have to hide from manhunter warg packs and stuff   It does mean abandoning a perfectly good test run where I'm doing well which is so much wasted time though Oh well.

Wait nevermind, that's stupid, I'll just update the mod midgame.

[Greep]

Playtest going well, should get this baby released either tomorrow or day after.  Unfortunately, I decided to playtest with randy, and I can't tell if the current 3 season lull is a bug in the math or just randy being randy... so I'm going to have to playtest a bunch further or add a bunch of logs.

Some things I noticed that will be addressed post-release:

-Shooting mechanics close up should get a multiplier of 200%. 
-Laying down should be 20%->50%
-Small size 50%->70%
-Rain 50->80%
-Keep fog at 50% I think?
-Disease needs a rework.  Going to add variability, remove penox altogether, lower average strength
-No turret runs suffer from what I'd call "tedious raid fatigue" Going to eliminate singular manhunters past season 1.
-Mid-game raids could use a small catastrophe chance element as well to keep people on their toes, it's a bit uninteresting to constantly think "oh I'll just barely win this".

And a comment: Holy hell tribals are scary without turrets :O

Edit: more playtest thoughts. 

-Midgame raids are pretty weak if you're gearing up well with high tier stuff.  I don't think this is a terrible thing, since gearing up to the kevlar + rifle level is a harder in this mod, but it's pretty noticeable.  Probably going to eliminate pawn influence on raids, and slightly increase tick influence.

-Easy access to trade does pose a problem:  Lots of easy access to one-off nukes.  This is making the late midgame too easy as I can pretty much buy nuke after nuke and blow everything to smithereens.  Not easy to balance with prices, as it could make selling dropped ones too good to sell.  Considering making these artifacts go the way of the heavy charge blaster and inferno cannon.  Only used against you. 

I think I'll need to patch this in before release, so I'm going to assume this is how it is as I move forward.  If you want explosives there's always frags.  This will make mechanoids terrifying, but that's probably a good thing.

-Also a trader issue, easy access to weapons and gear in general is making the implemented high tier rooming pointless.  Why make an earth shattering dining room when you've got a seller actually selling hyperweave?  My thoughts here are to play around with the expectations thoughts so that late game gets increasingly tougher to stay sane.  Less vital for release, probably a post-release thing.  Ideally, change expectations to be time-based so you aren't getting less mood with the things you're using to combat it.

-Probably going to have to also test a hard biome too.  Lack of turrets and traps, but more traders, probably has more of an impact on places where you can get less money.

-I'm actually building silver flooring which is good, but it's probably just because I have no artist.  Possibly working as intended.

-Probably going to start rich explorer with many many more components (triple digit), allowing an option for those who want to play with turrets as a crutch.  It would mean getting stuck with subpar colonists in the long term, but perhaps this is a good balance.

Looks like the raid size thing was just randy being weird.  Got a massive mechanoid army on day 80.

[Greep]

Yeah nevermind, I think the raid size is fine xD  Attack immediately tribals O.O

Aftermath after 24h:  1 death by bleed out, 2 infected, 5 captured, 1 dazed, everyone about to break and stoned, only two healthy colonists, one arm torn off.  So basically a win if there's no raids in the next day

As much as I'd like to see this fort through, I think I'm just going to set up the release tomorrow.

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